There have been many rumours swirling for more than a year about a so-called ‘reciprocity’ tax that Argentine would charge visitors from countries including the US, Canada and Australia. The concept is that these countries charge Argentine citizens a visa to visit, and so it’s only fair to reciprocate the tax.

US citizens are to be charged US$131, Canadians US$70 and Australians US$100.

Of course, paying cash upon arrival at an airport is soooo much easier than having to get a visa before even being able to buy a ticket to a far-away country. I know how hard it can be for Argentines without European passports to get a visa for Canada or US. If you don’t live in Buenos Aires, it requires a trip to the big capital and a long list of headaches, paperwork and finger-crossing. Rejections are not uncommon.
And so it’s only natural that things would swing the other way too. This is already in place in Chile, and tourists from North America heading to Brazil also have to get a visa in their passport (=headache, but ‘reciprocal’).

What bothers me is not the tax in itself, it’s the false-starts.

It all begin last January when the tax was announced. Of course, anybody who knows any Argentine knows that nothing new happens in Januaray, when the entire country goes into vacation mode. So the dates of early 2009 came and went.

And then came an announcement from the US embassy in Buenos Aires early in December that the tax would begin again this week. Today, December 20th, it was to start in fact. I called the embassy to ask about this and the person who spoke with me had no idea what I was talking about. The Canadian Embassy likewise had no information of a new start date.

So who knows where the US Embassy got its information. But it did get some nighties into a knot.

Still, I averted our clients arriving this weekend about the possibility that they’d get dinged for a hundred bucks each, just in case. Nobody was happy to hear of this, particularly the dad bringing his entire family.

But after having beaten the snowstorms raging through eastern North America this weekend, and after the relief of the postponed British Airway strike, just getting to Ezeiza was a treat in and of itself.

And of course, today, December 20, there was nobody charging any body any kind of reciprocal entry tax at all. No go, folks!

Again, it appears it was just another threat. Local papers are now reporting a start date of January 1. But as we’ve learned before, January is dubious at best.
What this has all proven to be, in the end, is a good welcome lesson to life in Argentina. Starts and stops, good ideas gone bad. Intentions not completed. A preference for vacation over work, etc etc etc.

And so those of you worrying if you’re going to get dinged or not must simply let the worry fade away.

This, the uncertainty of the first moment you are in the country, is just the first in a long list of surprises, unpredictabilities and unexplainable complications that make life down in Argentina so, um, interesting.